Nima Yousefi's Equinox of Insanity

UCSD Site Redesign, and Disasterous URLs

I just noticed the UCSD website has had a much-needed major redesign, which I think is it’s first real change in at least 10 years. It looks much better, and the information layout strikes me as more sensible as well. It still clearly suffers from linkage overload, but I’m afraid that’s a cultural problem shared by all university websites.

The URLs the site now uses, however, are totally ridiculous. The homepage’s url went from:

http://www.ucsd.edu

to:

http://www.ucsd.edu/portal/site/ucsd

Wow, thanks for putting “site” and the second “ucsd” in the URL for the UCSD site. I was totally confused there for a minute. I was like, “Whoa, what portal is this?”

It gets worse, though; if you click on “Admissions” — which takes you to quite possibly the most important page a university is going to have — you get the following URL:

http://www.ucsd.edu/portal/site/ucsd/menuitem.e25088fc289ee30b4bb91c8ad74b01ca/?vgnextoid=395edc247ef63110VgnVCM10000045b410acRCRD

That’s 130 characters, without the word “admissions” anywhere in the URL, which is totally freakin’ outrageous. And that’s just from clicking on a menu item (which, fortunately for us, is stated explicitly in the URL). But, and this is what’s so awesome, if you go to http://ucsd.edu/admissions (which is what the URL should be) you get redirected to the undergraduate admissions page. So, at least, there are reasonable URLs floating around the system at some level, they’re just routing visitors to the pages with the idiotic URLs instead.

Ideally, the goal is to have URLs that are “friendly,” but I think at the very least they shouldn’t be physically and psychologically abusive. That is to say, I don’t really need to see the “vgnextoid” value in the URL, do I? I think the crappy URLs make the new UCSD website worse than the old one.